1. Field of Invention
This invention relates to determining summaries of text information.
2. Description of Related Art
Corporations, government regulators, intelligence analysts and other researchers and knowledge workers are faced with reviewing and understanding an ever-increasing volume of information. Some researchers have attempted to reduce the volume of information by creating summaries based on the most relevant information. Relevance measures are frequently based on non-structural features such as keywords and/or term-frequency and inverse document frequency statistics for sets of documents in an information repository. However, these conventional, non-structural text summaries are frequently disjointed and difficult to read. Moreover, elements selected for these non-structural text summaries are based on statistical measures of importance. Therefore, pronouns in sequentially selected text summary elements may refer to elided preceding references reducing the usefulness of these conventional summaries.
Other researchers have attempted to improve the quality of text summaries by selectively removing less important information from a structure based summary. In these conventional structure based text summary systems, a structural representation of the text is determined. Less important information is pruned from the structural representation by selecting a desired level of subordination to be included in the text summary. These conventional structural text summaries preserve grammaticality by including referent information. However, the resultant text summary frequently includes more information than necessary to resolve the referent.